1Nanopb - Protocol Buffers for Embedded Systems 2============================================== 3 4[](https://travis-ci.org/nanopb/nanopb) 5 6Nanopb is a small code-size Protocol Buffers implementation in ansi C. It is 7especially suitable for use in microcontrollers, but fits any memory 8restricted system. 9 10* **Homepage:** http://kapsi.fi/~jpa/nanopb/ 11* **Documentation:** http://kapsi.fi/~jpa/nanopb/docs/ 12* **Downloads:** http://kapsi.fi/~jpa/nanopb/download/ 13* **Forum:** https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/nanopb 14 15 16 17Using the nanopb library 18------------------------ 19To use the nanopb library, you need to do two things: 20 211. Compile your .proto files for nanopb, using protoc. 222. Include pb_encode.c and pb_decode.c in your project. 23 24The easiest way to get started is to study the project in "examples/simple". 25It contains a Makefile, which should work directly under most Linux systems. 26However, for any other kind of build system, see the manual steps in 27README.txt in that folder. 28 29 30 31Using the Protocol Buffers compiler (protoc) 32-------------------------------------------- 33The nanopb generator is implemented as a plugin for the Google's own protoc 34compiler. This has the advantage that there is no need to reimplement the 35basic parsing of .proto files. However, it does mean that you need the 36Google's protobuf library in order to run the generator. 37 38If you have downloaded a binary package for nanopb (either Windows, Linux or 39Mac OS X version), the 'protoc' binary is included in the 'generator-bin' 40folder. In this case, you are ready to go. Simply run this command: 41 42 generator-bin/protoc --nanopb_out=. myprotocol.proto 43 44However, if you are using a git checkout or a plain source distribution, you 45need to provide your own version of protoc and the Google's protobuf library. 46On Linux, the necessary packages are protobuf-compiler and python-protobuf. 47On Windows, you can either build Google's protobuf library from source or use 48one of the binary distributions of it. In either case, if you use a separate 49protoc, you need to manually give the path to nanopb generator: 50 51 protoc --plugin=protoc-gen-nanopb=nanopb/generator/protoc-gen-nanopb ... 52 53 54 55Running the tests 56----------------- 57If you want to perform further development of the nanopb core, or to verify 58its functionality using your compiler and platform, you'll want to run the 59test suite. The build rules for the test suite are implemented using Scons, 60so you need to have that installed. To run the tests: 61 62 cd tests 63 scons 64 65This will show the progress of various test cases. If the output does not 66end in an error, the test cases were successful. 67 68Note: Mac OS X by default aliases 'clang' as 'gcc', while not actually 69supporting the same command line options as gcc does. To run tests on 70Mac OS X, use: "scons CC=clang CXX=clang". Same way can be used to run 71tests with different compilers on any platform. 72
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